Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Louis Sobol on divestment at Mount Allison

Louis Sobol recently wrote a piece in the National Observer about university divestment organizing in New Brunswick: Lessons from campaigning for divestment at Mount Allison University.

It covers some themes of the movement: the sense of ecological threat motivating people to take action, the dominant perspectives within the movement about intersectionality and progressive allyship, an explanation of the objective of stripping fossil fuel companies of social license, a description of a range of tactics used by campaign organizers, and frustration with the university’s response.

Redwater Energy Supreme Court decision

A bit of good news: Supreme Court rules energy companies cannot walk away from old wells.

The fossil fuel industry has huge future cleanup costs, including the UK’s North Sea platforms, and of course Canada’s bitumen sands. The CBC story notes:

Alberta has been dealing with a tsunami of orphaned oil and gas wells in the past five years. In 2014, the Orphan Well Association listed fewer than 200 wells to be reclaimed. The most recent numbers show there are 3,127 wells that need to be plugged or abandoned, and a further 1,553 sites that have been abandoned but still need to be reclaimed.

The industry functions by socializing costs and privatizing profits: for instance, imposing climate change on everybody while directing revenue to shareholders, staff, and executives. The post-productive phase for oil, gas, and coal projects can be a major opportunity to divert costs that should legitimately be borne by the corporation onto the public.

Saudi Arabia as an argument for Canadian oil

An increasingly frequent media line from supporters of the bitumen sands and the fossil fuels industry generally is that if oil isn’t produced in Canada it will be produced in Saudi Arabia instead, and that is undesirable because the conduct of people in Saudi Arabia is unethical while Canadians behave ethically. As more morally worthy recipients of fossil fuel revenues, Canadian industry can thus feel unblemished by any adverse consequences the bitumen sands produce.

Obviously it’s a weak argument. At the most basic level, misconduct by some unrelated party has no bearing on whether or not Canada’s ethical choices are acceptable. One can object factually by questioning how much Saudi oil really comes to Canada. One can make the economic argument that if we’re not burning all the oil, we should burn the cheapest stuff and avoid developing the expensive stuff. You can argue that a global transition away from oil, intended to avoid catastrophic climate change, will eventually undermine Saudi oil revenues too. In the alternative, you can argue that this is simply a deflection, not a sincere effort to critique the conduct of the Saudi government or to propose any meaningful solutions to that problem. It’s using the mistaken supposition that we can solve one problem (while actually doing nothing) to strengthen political resistance to implementing real climate change solutions.

Has anyone seen a good online rebuttal to this general argument? It would be good to have some convincing pages to link, as well as rebuttal’s pithy enough to include in a tweet or blog comment.

News on North American planetary stewardship not encouraging

Some less-than-encouraging news today:

The first story about the poll has some room for interpretation. Seeing pipelines as a “crisis” doesn’t necessarily mean supporting them, though the article goes on to say: “Looking at Canadians’ impressions of the Trans Mountain and Energy East pipelines, 53 per cent of respondents voiced support for both, while 19 per cent opposed both, 17 per cent couldn’t decide”. It also notes: “Comparing age groups on pipeline issues, the survey found the majority of Canadians ages 18 to 34 were not supportive of pipelines, while little more than half of those ages 35 to 54 were supportive, and those over the age of 55 expressed the most support for pipelines and labelled the lack of pipeline capacity a crisis.”

In part this reflects a crisis of education and self-interest. Older Canadians who are likely the least informed about climate change and the economics of a global transition to decarbonization are the most supportive of climate-wrecking old industries. They are also the ones with the least to lose personally from climate change.

As for Trump’s pro-coal plan, it’s not surprising from someone who is gleefully controlled by industry and utterly uncomprehending of everything complex. Still, it demonstrates the huge danger of backsliding with climate change policy. For every leader who tries to do something helpful (almost always while keeping climate change at a lower level of priority than economic growth and other objectives) there can be a successor who takes us back to a place worse than when we started. The challenge of climate change isn’t just putting the right policies in place, but keeping them there long enough to matter.

Open thread: novel activist tactics

One criticism of the climate activist movement is that it continues to rely on tactics which were either never effective or which have lost effectiveness as opponents of decarbonization have learned to counter them.

This is a central part of the thesis in Micah White’s book The End of Protest, in which he argues in particular that big marches have lost their ability to help.

It’s worth devoting a thread to any new activist tactics. For instance, there is this recent show of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en in British Columbia: Convoys of pipeline protesters slow traffic on Ontario’s busiest highway.

twitter’s an addictive land of trolls

I have written before about the cognitive and emotional (and insomniac) downsides of checking the news too often. It seems worth re-emphasizing how twitter is a worst-case scenario in this regard, at least for people more interested in developments in matters of public interest than developments in the lives of friends and acquaintances, where facebook is untouchable.

With twitter it’s possible to use any internet-connected device to get an endless stream of updates and — crucially — little decisions for as long as you want at any time of day. It’s an exercise perfectly crafted to short-circuit longer term planning, even at the scale of turning off your phone to get a night’s rest before a busy day tomorrow. Every tweet presents the cognitive task of interpreting the content; determining whether it contains any factual, ethical, or political claims; and then evaluating that content in light of what the user believes and what, if anything, they are trying to accomplish through engagement online. Even for fairly passive users, every tweet involves the decision of whether to publicly ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ it, forcing your brain to engage decision-making circuitry more often and immediately than when reading a news article or book. Of course the real addictive prompts come from the social features: the notifications that someone has ‘liked’ or responded to your tweet. That engages all the emotional machinery which we use to socialize with others, maintain or alter our beliefs about the world, and protect out own self-esteem. It also embodies the slot machine logic of unpredictable and variable responses to the same action, ranging from someone amazing expressing agreement or saying something clever in response to your message to the depredations of the most hateful trolls.

Twitter often exposes me to content which I subsequently wish I could unsee, including particularly blockheaded claims and arguments which tend to re-emerge with a sense of frustration and anger in the shower the next day. The platform isn’t entirely without virtues — it can provide useful or at least engaging up-to-the-minute information and analysis on ongoing events, it allows users to engage directly with people who would otherwise be inaccessible, and perhaps it does sometimes direct people to good quality information they wouldn’t otherwise see. At the same time, it’s the venue for the least pleasant interactions in my life and it’s a repository of almost limitless idiocy and unkindness.

I have resolved for now to “cut off the time wasters quickly. They can’t be won over and whatever value there is in publicly refuting their arguments doesn’t justify the time and stress commitment”. There’s really no alternative strategy possible, since the platform is so full of people who (a) aren’t debating in good faith (b) can never be convinced or won over and (c) only get nastier with repeated interaction. They can take decades of meticulously collected, analyzed, and reviewed scientist and ‘refute‘ it with a silly accusation about the scientist or the person referencing them, a conspiracy theory, or an disreputable source which is nonetheless equally accessible online. Maybe very early on engaging with them helps draw some of the undecideds who are silently observing toward well-supported beliefs, but that almost certainly ceases to be true once your back and forth with that person has become one of your top ten present-moment sources of annoyance and irritability.

US carbon pollution rising

Several recent analyses have found that America’s contribution to climate change worsened in 2018:

There are a number of factors behind the rise in US emissions in 2018, some natural, mostly economic.

Prolonged cold spells in a number of regions drove up demand for energy in the winter, while a hot summer in many parts led to more air conditioning, again pushing up electricity use.

However economic activity is the key reason for the overall rise in CO2 emissions. Industries are moving more goods by trucks powered by diesel, while consumers are travelling more by air.

In the US this led to a 3% increase in diesel and jet fuel use last year, a similar rate of growth to that seen in the EU in the same period.

Economic growth consistently ranks as a higher priority for governments than environmental protection, even though failure to constrain carbon emissions threatens to destroy the entire economy in the decades ahead. Furthermore, failure to act anywhere legitimates inaction elsewhere. I’m sure the media and people commenting online about Canadian climate policy will use these headlines about the US to argue that action in Canada is pointless.

RCMP enforcing gas pipeline construction

In British Columbia, the Unist’ot’en Camp has been operating for years to try to keep fossil fuel pipelines out of the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.

Anticipating RCMP enforcement of a court order to allow access for the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline to Kitimat, the Gidimt’en checkpoint was more recently established to protect unceded lands from pipeline construction.

That checkpoint has now been demolished with 14 arrests.

The Unist’ot’en Camp may be the next target for police action.

Rallies in support of the Wet’suwet’en have taken place in a number of Canadian cities, including Toronto, with more being planned.

All this highlights at least three major contradictions. The British Columbia government is trying to be a climate leader, while also trying to develop a liquified natural gas (LNG) industry which may cause more climate damage than coal once leakage from fracking and the rest of the gas network is taken into account. Canada is also simultaneously trying to develop fossil fuel export infrastructure while trying to play a productive role in global decarbonization. Thirdly, the Trudeau government is trying to undertake reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, while simultaneously being willing to use the power of the state to force fossil fuel project construction in spite of Indigenous opposition.

Blair King’s weak political reasoning

Blair King has added another post to our back and forth discussion about climate change politics: Let’s face it hypocrisy matters in the pipeline and climate change debates.

He’s still discussing his claim that people who advocate for decarbonization while still relying on fossil fuels are hypocrites:

There is no denying that an activist who claims that we should not use fossil fuels while wearing a gortex jacket and driving a car to the protest is indeed a hypocrite.

He’s still wrong, because he still fails to grasp how the call for decarbonization is about changing how things are now done. It’s a pretty basic point. If it were already possible to live without fossil fuels, the kind of global transformation that I and other activists are calling for would have already happened and not be necessary. Saying that you’re a hypocrite to be stuck in a bad system while calling for a better one is a bit like saying that we need to keep being dependent on fossil fuels because that’s the bad situation we’re already in (see: previously).

Dr. King argues that his position is valid because in public opinion surveys other people agree that people who use fossil fuels are less credible in calling for their phaseout. That’s the nature of fallacies: they are superficially or emotionally convincing. People have an intuitive sense that an anvil should fall faster than a feather on the airless surface of the Moon, but it just isn’t so.

He argues:

Climate change and pipelines represent global issues that require global solutions. Because they are such big issues a lot of activists claim that their personal efforts won’t make a difference and that any change will need to be implemented by governments and businesses. This response is a cop-out. In essence, these activists are off-loading the responsibility to show leadership and instead demanding that government force a change in behaviour on the population.

In doing so, he continues to misunderstand the nature of large-scale political change. He’s buying into an atomized liberal capitalist notion that what matters most is individual consumer choice and then when all those little actions get added up they should produce the kind of change people want in aggregate. This totally misses how people aren’t free to choose the global-scale systems that underlie their lives. You can’t opt out of the global energy system. The only way to change it is through politics, and particularly through the kind of efforts activists are making to discourage fossil fuel use, discourage new fossil fuel projects, and encourage the emergence of climate-safe forms of energy.

He very misleadingly claims:

If the activists are successful in implementing their preferred policies then every citizen will be affected and the hardest hit will be the poorest among us.

This misses how decarbonization has the potential to vastly decrease inequalities in energy access and lifestyles around the world, as we move from an extractivist system where fossil fuels are extracted where they are abundant to produce goods and energy to serve people where they are rich to one where people everywhere are increasingly able to produce and use similar amounts of energy generated in ways that don’t harm the climate. The need to address extreme poverty globally is why only a contraction and convergence based approach to decarbonization is politically plausible: everyone needs to cut fossil fuel use, but at the same time there must be more equality between the richest and poorest. Furthermore, Dr. King misses how the people most vulnerable to climate change are those with the fewest resources, making a global deal where we trade some fossil-fuel driven affluence for more equality and planetary stability still more appealing for them.

Another odd thing about Dr. King is that he keeps asserting the superiority of his expertise as a scientist, while the subjects he is actually commenting on are essentially politics and ethics. He has no special claim to expertise in those fields, and the quality of his arguments suggests that his self-assessment of his level of proficiency is faulty.

There’s probably not much point in continuing to engage with him. The broad strategy of climate change deniers and delayers is just to maintain the false sense that what we ought to do remains unknown. It’s straight from Frank Luntz’s infamous memo and the tobacco industry’s “doubt is our product“. Wrap that up with a few legitimate claims about why the transition to decarbonization is hard (which decarbonization activists nearly all accept, aside from a few techno-cornucopians) and you can produce what appears superficially to be a meaningful critique of climate change activism, but which is really resentment intermixed with excuses to preserve the status quo, with no credible proposal for addressing the planetary crisis we have created.

Hypocrisy back and forth

Blair King (whose blog bio says he has an “Interdisciplinary PhD in Chemistry and Environmental Studies”) is one of the people who had sent a tweet arguing that only people who use few or no fossil fuels can call for decarbonization and who I linked to this rebuttal post. He subsequently wrote his own response to me. I appreciate the substantive quality of what he wrote, but I still disagree with his conclusions.

To begin with, he says:

The reason the charge of hypocrisy is used so often in this debate is because it represents a valid concern. We live in a world full of hypocrites who will say one thing in public and do another in the privacy of their own lives. The problem is that until you have personally tried to go without fossil fuels you can’t really understand how hard it really will be. So a hypocrite is apt to make claims that are not founded on an understanding of the scope of the challenge, usually that doing so will be relatively easy

Fair comment, but I don’t think I understate the cost, difficulty, or challenge of rebuilding of the global energy system, nor automatically assume people in the future will use as much energy as we do today. Saving the biosphere justifies major lifestyle changes.

He goes on to say: “[t]o suggest that we can make massive global political changes without anyone making individual changes represents magical thinking”. That’s not what I have been saying at all. My point is that it’s wrongheaded to argue that only people who don’t use oil can call for decarbonization and further that efforts at addressing climate change through voluntary individual action are hopeless. People will definitely need to make changes, but they won’t for the most part be voluntary and individual. People don’t individually decide what sort of power plants get built, where our raw materials come from, or how any part of our integrated, technological global society functions. A lot of those systems have actually been set up by larger entities like corporations and governments making choices, but so far that decision making doesn’t reflect a determination to control how much fossil fuel gets burned and thus how much climate change gets imposed on the world. Decarbonization requires large scale political change and the relevant criterion for evaluating our individual behaviour is whether it is promoting or impeding that transition.

Dr. King then goes on to talk about sea level, challenging my prior claim that there are “centuries of experience that the sea level is always at more or less the same height”. Oddly, he then includes a chart that directly supports my point. It shows sea level going back to 1880, and shifting from about 125 mm below the zero axis to about 50 mm above. Compared to what is being induced by us melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the variation he shows is trivial. As described in the sea level rise portion of the U of T divestment brief: “A 2009 Science article examined the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and ice sheet stability. The paper identifies how the last time global CO2 concentrations were at current levels, global temperatures were between 3 ˚C and 6 ˚C hotter and sea levels were ’25 to 40 meters higher than at present’.” Expected sea level rise resulting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use is of the order of 1 m to much more: well outside the scope of what anatomically modern humans have experienced, and certainly way beyond what our present-day seafront infrastructure was built for.

Dr. King doesn’t provide much of a response to my using David MacKay’s book as evidence that there is enough renewable and fission energy available to more than replace our current fossil fuel use. In the same paragraph, he argues that somehow the creation of hydrogen-powered airliners is a critical missing part of decarbonization. First, I don’t assume that people will or should be able to fly anywhere near as much as they currently do. Second, I make clear in my post that decarbonization is a progressive process that needs to begin with the fossil fuel use that’s easiest to eliminate before moving to the harder stuff. If you want to keep using them, planes and rockets need energy dense fuel so they’re both part of the hardest to shift portion of our emissions. I would be happy to see air travel become much rarer and more expensive, and accept that such a shift is probably a necessary part of our overall decarbonization effort.

On raw materials, Dr. King says:

Petrochemicals represent a treasure trove of stored chemical energy that simply cannot be replaced given our current scientific knowledge and energy systems.

I wasn’t saying that replacing fossil fuels will be easy. I have been consistent in saying it’s one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced and it’s far from clear whether we will manage it. That said, there is no basis for saying that fossil fuels are an irreplaceable raw material. If their precursors could be made by plants out of air and sunlight we can do the same thing: quite possibly at a smaller scale than today’s petrochemical-fed industries and at a higher cost, but again I accept that many things in a low carbon future will be rarer and more costly than they are now.

It might affect Dr. King emotionally to know that I have actually done a lot personally to reduce my fossil fuel dependence and contribution to climate change. I have structured my life so that I can do everything essential on foot: easily able to walk to work and to complete necessary errands. At times, I go weeks at a time without even taking public transit. I have never had a driver’s license or owned a car. I last flew in 2007 and the last time I visited my family and hometown was in 2009/10 by Greyhound, which we calculated would be substantially less greenhouse-gas intensive than flying. I live in a single room on a floor shared by three people. I don’t bring this stuff up in response to hypocrisy allegations because I think the whole ‘only someone who doesn’t use fossil fuels can or should call for decarbonization’ is logically unsound. It’s perhaps worth mentioning here in response to Dr. King’s argument that only people who have chosen to greatly reduce their footprint can know what sort of future they are calling for. I think I have such an idea and, if the alternative is imposing the kind of massive threat that we currently are on people in the future and non-human nature, I think those sacrifices and more are not only acceptable but mandatory.

The emotional tone of Dr. Blair’s post is a bit exasperating in that he seems to think that his level of contempt toward the caricature he has developed of me is itself somehow an argument. He and his supporters have gotten into a big huff because I blocked him on twitter. This easily bleeds into the utterly indefensible argument that anyone who you care to talk to has the obligation to listen to you, and to do so on a platform of your choice (brilliantly lampooned by XKCD). As most people now seem to accept, twitter is a pretty awful place made marginally more tolerable by the ability to block people. I routinely encounter climate change deniers and twitter users who don’t even try to respond to substantive arguments but who simply hurl abuse. If I didn’t block them, they would dominate my timeline. Furthermore, I think I have every right to block people whose tweets I don’t want to see: a category that still includes Dr. King and the other twitter users who took a personally interest in the matter of this banning who followed on after him in arguing that blocking him was very, very wrong.

Another basic error in Dr. King’s post shows in the title: “When political scientists do environmental science the results are not always pretty”. The question of what we ought to do in response to climate change certainly requires science to answer. We need to know how much warming will result from how much coal, oil, and gas burning and what consequence a given level of warming will have for humanity and the rest of nature. Actually deciding what to do, however, goes well beyond environmental science to incorporate politics, economics, and most fundamentally ethics. Condemning people in the future for thousands of years to live in a world which we destabilized and degraded through our selfish use of fossil fuels is a profoundly immoral choice. If we’re not going to make it, we need to stop producing new fossil fuel production, transport, export, and use architecture in rich and highly polluting places like Canada and then play a determined and good faith role in spreading climate-safe energy technologies globally. That’s not the “Chinese Communist Party and Russia’s Vladimir Putin” view, as Dr. Blair rather childishly alleges. That’s survival politics in the 21st century. The alternative is not to keep the cozy fossil-dependent world we have now, but see how rich and prosperous we can remain as devastating global change is making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and huge numbers of people start fighting over what’s left.